Online Activities: Ancient Egypt
Something Old, Something New: the Deir el-Haggar Visitor Centre
By Roberta L. Shaw, Egyptian Department
Picture this: a tiny perfect Egyptian temple ruin nestled between undulating dunes in the Sahara half-way between the Nile and the Libyan border, the desert silence broken only by the quaint song of flittering Trumpeter Finches, today the only inhabitants of "the god's mansion". This remote, tranquil site is known as the temple of Deir el-Haggar, and it is situated about one kilometre from the village of Mahoub at the extreme western end of the Dakhleh Oasis. It offers a welcome relief from the bustle associated with the Nile Valley, and it is now open to tourists with a penchant for an off-the-beaten-path experience.
The temple was described briefly by A.J. (Tony) Mills, Director of the Dakhleh Oasis Project and past curator in the Royal Ontario Museum's Egyptian Department in the Archaeological Newsletter of May 1983 (New Series, No. 216). It dates from the Roman Period, and has inscriptions from the reigns of Nero, Vespatian, Titus and Domitian (A.D. 5496). The final detailing was never completed, but the temple remained in use for several centuries. Once abandoned, much of the monument was enveloped by the huge sand dune that is still visible to the south.
Although the temple has been visited, and to some extent studied, over the past 150 years, its ruinous state left little more than a jumble of sandstone for visitors to scramble over, with some concern for safety. The collapse of the roof and the north wall made its interior inaccessible. Tony Mills, in consultation with the Egyptian antiquities authorities, decided to undertake development of the site in order to open it for the "less agile" of us.
The rehabilitation of this temple was completed in early March of this year. The programme, begun in 1991, was a joint project of the Supreme Council of Antiquities and the Dakhleh Oasis Project. Because the setting is reminiscent of one of those romantic 19th-century (especially David Roberts) watercolours of Egypt, Tony and Adam Zelinski, who acted as co-managers, kept the locale's flavour by minimizing reconstruction.
